And of course there is a deeper story that binds all her narrative finds together: one about the mysterious relationship between people and things. We impose narratives upon objects, we extract narratives from them, and we save narratives within them. Spivack could have written a brand-new book exploring that idea in many thousands of original words. But there’s something powerful in telling that story by, instead, pointing; it’s arguably more powerful, in fact, and it certainly isn’t easy to do it well.

If everything is a remix, the future is already here, it makes sense that the most impactful research for innovation, the research that helps organisations connect with a new opportunity, points to tangible signals of possibility. It sure as hell doesn't float on a cloud of theoretical ambiguity.